Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real - Wasted

More Promise Than Real

Lukas Nelson’s vocal is a little less the acquired taste than his father’s, but it still occupies that familial higher nasal’n’twang register. It is for me a welcome, distinguishing feature. In reviewing Lukas’ previous album, Promise of the Real, I like other commentators referred to the father/son link, and this has been reinforced by the shared vocals on their Pearl Jam cover Just Breathe to be released on Willie’s new album Heroes. This is essentially a softly crooned version that does little other than re-present a good song with the noted Nelsonesque tone. As tributes go, it’s good enough to see Willie at least keeping the ear in, not that this is his first time.

On Lukas’ previous album there were two stand-out tracks – Toppers and Pali Gap – Hey Baby (New Rising Sun) – and that’s the quality of what I’m looking for on this latest offering. After quite an average start, 4^th track Frame of Mind gets nearest at this point, though this too is straightforward rather than anything sparkling, but it is a tenderly sung ballad that demonstrates the attraction of Lukas’ voice. Next track The Joint is similarly slow and melodic, focusing lyrically on one of the running themes of this album which is smoking pot. It is a strange narrative indulgence, but I guess it has occupied much of Lukas and possibly his band Promise of the Real’s time on their recent extensive touring. 

It’s not until 6^th Don’t Take Me Back that we get some reasonably aggressive guitar work leading a song. Interestingly, and worryingly for some early observers, that narrative preoccupation sets the immediate scene: I was sitting in my daddy’s car with a joint in both of my hands smokin’ until the smoke wouldn’t stop and the window rolled down and I’m rollin’ around in my mind and that injection of the ‘rolling’ metaphor seems a tad unimaginative if honest. The song turns out to be a chugging blues which is reasonably engaging, but it doesn’t really take us very far down the road musically or in illuminating the point of concentrating so heavily on smoking dope.

9^th Running Away gets lively with its use of percussion – various drumming and handclaps – as well as whistling. By 10^th Heart of the Matter I’m finding that it’s these slower country blues ballads [thanks here to pedal steel] which connect the most, and that’s because of the vocal which by now seems to draw on Willie’s country tinge for impact as much as the genetic sound. It is an emotive singing here, rising climatically to its end. Ditto 11^th Can You Hear Me Love You. What I thought from the beginning would be another rock album, as average as that sound is, has actually leant much more to these ballads, and 12^th I Won’t Fail Her is quite a pretty acoustic folk tune with a dominant angelic chorus providing a sonic twist at this near-end of the album. Perhaps my favourite on the album. The title track Wasted comes in as the penultimate 13^th song, and, naturally, this revisits the marijuana mulling in a belts and braces basic rock. One presumes it was selected as the title track more for its story than sound, and this is borne out by Lukas’ comments on how the songs on this album reflect the time wasted on the tour road with the journeying itself but also late night indulgences, as well as the more poignant sense of loss and wasted time in being away from loved ones.

The album finishes on the nine minutes of If I Was The Ocean which continues with the slower pace that I have preferred as a relative choice on this. Pedal steel and guitar sweeps provide an expansive sound, but it isn’t a particularly distinct melody, and the closing guitar jam is something I would like to have heard more within other tracks. Anyone reading this would understandably question why I’ve written so much to celebrate so little. It’s a review written on the listen which I like to do, and I had some genuine, positive expectation because of Lukas’ previous which had impressed in parts. It is only a first listen too, but my feeling is there was more compulsive urge than thoughtful composition in the recording and release of this material. I’d like to see Lukas and the band live where they are widely reported to be brilliant, and I look forward to a third album release that reflects and then builds upon the occasional excellence of the first.

Sassy Songs

Couldn’t Stand The Weather – Stevie Ray Vaughan

Coming up with these posting categories because an idea suddenly grabs me, I’ll no doubt forget them. But as the idea is here now,

the sass in this song begins in those opening pauses, three-beat halting teases in the rhythmic riff. And the sudden silence of the drumming. As it kicks in, the bass also plays its role in thumping out the song’s stepping beat. With Stevie it doesn’t take a whole lot of analysis on why the rest is sublime sass, being simply the brilliant playing, but it’s also to do with the baritone guitar that gives the soloing a resonating depth, feedback finessed throughout. 

Cry

A snigger

inside allegory:

that loincloth

flapping such

swirly belief,

the sheen has

slid. To importune

its recital now is

an imploding cry.

Jimi Hendrix 3

Another copy I have framed and hanging on the, to be precise, Jimi Hendrix music wall

Willie's Breath

Willie Nelson - Just Breathe

If you click on the link below you can hear Willie's cover of the Pearl Jam ballad Just Breathe. He sings with son Lukas, and it's from his album Heroes to be released in May.

http://www1.rollingstone.com/hearitnow/player/willienelson.html

Live Loaded

The Loading Zone – Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, 2^nd October, 1968

As Mrs Some Awe and I are painting, I’ve got this playing in the background [she preferred the Stones, but that’s long finished]. I have their first eponymous album, but this is a bootleg recording of one of their many live gigs, usually in support of other SA bands of the time – Jefferson Airplane et al - but also visiting artists like The Who, Cream and so on.

It’s essentially soul/funk psychedelia, perhaps more emphasis in this 4^th incarnation of the band on the funk leanings, and in this version of the band led by the outstanding vocals of Linda Tillery. One of the founding members Paul Fauerso plays mean keyboards, like his solo on Cold Sweat as part of an extended jam, with Tod Anderson belting out punchy tenor sax. A brilliant live band, they must have been a blast to hear on the circuit and given many of the bigger names they supported an aural run for their money/fame. It’s easy, however, to see how the band never made it big for themselves when much of their material – as superb as it is – was covers, on this performance including Summertime, Shop Around, and Try a Little Tenderness [a gorgeous and raunchy vocal from Tillery]. This bootleg is a great recording.

VIP

The Rolling Stones - L.A. Friday (Live 1975)

Third in the Stones’ own digital-only downloads of their bootleg performances, this 1975 concert was recorded on Sunday – not Friday, go figure - at the end of their 5 day Los Angeles Forum swagger and is notable for Ronnie Wood’s replacement of Mick Taylor as guitar compadre of Keith Richards. There are some slick licks to reflect this.

It is a performance full of sass, with Jagger indulging in another one of his linguistic chameleon acts, here sounding like an LA gansta a la 70s style. What a wonderful fraud. The performance opens with a great rendition of Honkey Tonk Woman. There’s a superb Gimme Shelter [I should just state now it’s all superb, but I still have favourites], Billy Preston gets two spotlights with That’s Life and Outta Space, Brown Sugar soars, there’s a 15 minute You Can’t Always Get What You Want filled with some great sax by Trevor Lawrence, two emotive Jagger-slanged offerings of Angie and the beautiful ‘sad sad song’ Wild Horses, and the concert finishes on a penultimate, stonking Jumping Jack Flash with that great Richards/Woods interplay, and final Sympathy For the Devil who will have been listening throughout with glee.

Only saw the Stones live once* in 1995, twenty years after this recording, at Wembley and on their Voodoo Lounge tour. Apart from simply being a special experience in its own right, my family and I also got VIP parking and were allowed to enter the stadium before anyone else to select our seats: the result of a letter of complaint about a previous visit to the Freddie Mercury Memorial Concert, and that’s another story.

[*] Well, that's wrong - senior/other moment - as I of course saw them in '69 at the Hyde Park concert, though technically I didn't 'see' them as my friend and I arrived late, having hitchhiked up from Ipswich, and it was rather crowded so we only ever managed to hear them in the distance. But I was there.....

Satan's Opera

Sadly censorious

we bewail

such a rumpus

of an opera:

the degeneracy in

this depository of

satan. We earmark

what is heard

and coexist.

Jimi Hendrix 2

Another facsimile I have, framed and hanging on the music wall

Jimi Hendrix

I have a a copy of this poster, and a few others I will post, and an original that I really do cherish.

Daydream

A leopard’s

daydream to have

an edible clientele

at his fingertips,

the prosthetic

replacing claws

in this rosy

emulation of

domesticity.

Cormac McCarthy – No Country for Old Men

Never For A Lazy Sunday

After reading DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, I began his first novel Ablutions, having ordered on the strength of his superlative sophomore book. Its dark bartender narrative, however, didn’t engage me and I soon gave up. That much observed ennui and despair without any sense of a comic or even sardonic overview just didn’t have the capacity to maintain my interest. It could be that the brilliance of The Sisters Brothers cast too daunting an expectation.

So I turned to my recent charity shop purchace of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, my first McCarthy read [I am behind the times, this book itself published in 2005, though like many I’d seen the Coen brothers’ film]. If Ablutions appears saloon dark and dirty, No Country... is the blackest and bleakest of universal presentations, though pointedly set in 1980s America, Texas to be precise, so it is best to see it as socio-historically and culturally a Western universalising, even a modernised Wild West metaphor.

What it does possess is a dark humour to counter-balance its nihilism. Sheriff Bell has a homespun philosophical wit that allows him to observe wryly on the things that abhor, frighten and disappoint him about the world as it is. Even the evil Chigurh has his comic assessments, either through internal narrative or dialogue when thinking about or relaying directly to the person he is about to kill.

The themes of honour and duty are prevalent ones, and McCarthy presents them with an amazing insight into their complexities. Sheriff Bell has an ‘old-fashioned’ commitment to serve and protect the citizens who fall within his jurisdiction, though he would extend this to anyone in genuine need because that is the way he was brought up. These ‘old-fashioned’ values are for Bell the ones upon which his country/county [an important symbolism as well as linguistic similarity] have been built and which are now under absolute threat by the modern world, or the world of the 80s when the story is set. The ostensible threat comes from narcotics in every aspect of its grip on the country/county/[world]: the effects of the drug itself, the criminals who buy and sell it, the ‘dopes’ who take it, the horrific consequences of this, and ultimately the greed and dispassion which underpins and grows from it. The main consequence of this in the novel is a multitude of killings. McCarthy's detailed description of these and the guns that facilitate it provides an astonishingly informed and clinical narrative.

The relentless, remorseless Chigurh has his own code of honour which is to carry out his commitment to a job whatever the cost. The cost is usually killing someone or many people and he is unstoppable in this commitment. The only iota of escape offered to occasional imminent victims – if they even have a moment of such opportunity – is the flip of a coin, which in the two cases it is offered doesn’t even work in their favour. Chigurh’s world and control over it is that certain – even chance has no chance of changing the inevitable.

Other key characters are Moss, somewhere in the middle of good-guy Bell and bad-guy Chigurh, a Vietnam vet and welder who stumbles on that very nightmare consequence of this drug-corrupted modern world and in being tempted to benefit from this, essentially launches the story with its multiple escapes and chases, his own existential greed tempered by not having been directly involved in the existence of the money he decides to take as well as wanting mainly to improve his and his wife’s quality of life; his wife Carla Jean whose Christian beliefs are frankly not up to competing with what is going on at this time, and Bell’s wife Loretta who loves her husband unconditionally and provides him with stoical support as well as a colossal wisdom: the closing scenes of these two reflecting on and talking about what their life and the world in general has become provides the book’s most perceptive philosophy

There is so much more that I have left out – like Bell’s wartime secret – but that’s for you to read, but also the fact that for all of its simple narrative, driven by hypnotically realistic and/or surreal dialogue, it is packed with depths and complex tangents. I don’t know if the following Times recommendation on the back cover blurb is taken out of context, but it is so woefully bereft of touching on this book’s impact and significance that it is genuinely hilarious:

A Western thriller with a racy plot and punchy dialogue. Perfect for a lazy Sunday.

Devious

What worse than

a smutty spouse,

her turret slog

your trepidation?

Devious, you evolve

wilting to awesome

metamorphosis, and

this your touch

of interregnum.

Stone the Crows - The BBC Sessions Volume 1 1969-1970

No Crowing, Til Now

On this blog I write and get excited about old and new artists who are above average to outstanding and that's great fun. At times, I'm listening and thinking hard about who to choose, partly because there is just such a colossal choice, and partly because I want to select and say something spot on about music close to me, either over time or for a specific memory, but then get caught up in the anticipation of writing rather than the listening.

I had no intention of writing about this album tonight. I just put in on to listen. To be more precise, I was listening to a Spooky Tooth live in Germany - having played Better By You, Better Than Me the other day from my vinyl copy - but this is on the hard drive so played on the computer and the recording is a bit airy so I went back in and chose another recording near it in the Ss. Thus Stone the Crows.

Wow. All that previous writing about other chanteuses and I haven't yet mentioned one of the greatest: Maggie Bell. And Jim Dewar's vocal is also brilliant [going on to notably play bass and take lead vocal with the Robin Trower Band] and such a superb complement here - listen to the impressive interchange on Raining In Your Heart. So all this preamble to introduce this chance listen and writing and I'm not really going to say much more. It's absolutely simple: recorded live, for radio, so STC at their best; cool lead guitar by Les Harvey; great British rockblues and this stunning singing.

Coalition

Singing contralto,

he is not sissy but

sisyphean, the wrong

sex though hardy

in effort. His salvo of

sound the subrogation

failing – how such a coalition

hails flexure yet snaps back

a suffocated scheme.